Driver safety and efficiency is of paramount concern to any party operating a vehicle on roads and highways. Improving driver safety and efficiency is very important to a company running and/or managing a fleet of commercial vehicles. Such commercial vehicle fleets are typically comprised of trucks and other heavy duty vehicles that usually transport high value goods over vast distances. Other vehicle fleets may also use and/or operate passenger vehicles (e.g., taxi companies, security companies, etc.) to be operated off-highway. Therefore, parties interested in assessing one or more driver's safety and/or efficiency may be interested in assessing the driving behavior of the driver of the vehicle in relation to the driving behavior of other drivers of other vehicles that are part of the same fleet. A non-punitive, yet challenging competition between drivers may give individual drivers the incentive to drive safely and efficiently. Telemetry data from vehicles may give interested parties an understanding of the driver's driving patterns and may contribute to the assessment of safety and/or efficiency.
Interested parties may use and/or employ geospatial positioning devices that communicate geospatial data based on a worldwide navigational and surveying facility dependent on the reception of signals from an array of orbiting satellites (e.g., Global Positioning System (GPS) technology). Another device might be a Real Time Locator System (RTLS) which uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to transmit the physical location of RFID tagged objects. In addition, such geospatial positioning devices may be placed directly within vehicles by Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). For example, car manufacturers may install OEM telematics solutions (e.g., OnStar™) within all their vehicles.
The use of GPS, RTLS, RFID or OEM telematics based geospatial positioning devices to enable the gathering of telemetry data is gaining prominence. Geospatial positioning devices are frequently used to track and gather telemetry data associated with the vehicle. Certain locations, driving behaviors and/or patterns of movement associated with the driver and his/her vehicle may be indicative of an increased or decreased safety and/or efficiency risk. Gathering such data indicative of a driver's safety and/or efficiency may be useful to improve the safety and/or efficiency of the driver and/or a fleet of drivers using components of game theory.
For example, one reliable indicator of the safety of a driver may be the acceleration rate of the driver's vehicle. If the vehicle acceleration is high, it is likely that the driver may be wasting gasoline and increasing risks of accidents and other mishaps. This determination may be extrapolated to analyze and assess the safety and/or efficiency risk of an entire fleet of vehicles and their corresponding individual drivers. Therefore, what is needed is a method for utilizing geospatial data (e.g., locational data associated with the a vehicle) to assess driver behavior by gathering and using telemetry data associated with the vehicle to improve driver safety and efficiency by incorporating components of game theory (e.g., mathematics, statistics, economics, and psychology) to incentivize and motivate drivers to drive safely and efficiently.